The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Development of software systems is often a large undertaking for businesses. Often, developers create documents that specify how the software system should be developed. These documents may include explanations, figures, flow charts and other expressions of ideas regarding requirements, implementation, execution or use of the software system. The specification may also include documents that specify specific programming aspects of the software system. These program aspects include, for example, naming and defining software classes, function declarations, relationship of software classes to one another, specific comments that are to be placed in program files. By specifying this information on the developer side, one result that is achieved is that different portions of the overall software system may be better interrelated with one another.
Developers often adhere to a convention or a set of guidelines in how certain types of information are presented in the specification for the software system. This forces programmers to follow a convention that is understood by all of the developers and programmers that work on the software system.
Despite using a software design specification with guidelines, creating code files based on the design specification is often tedious and labor intensive. Typically, programmers manually refer to the design specification continuously while entering code. Certain programming tasks, such as function declarations and listing class attributes, require the programmer to go back and forth between the specification and the program files in order to write the correct syntax for the code that corresponds to the function declarations and class attributes. Often, the programmer must also structure the program files that are created according to what is provided or otherwise specified in the design specification. This is also a labor intensive task, as the program files can have long directory paths that are at least partially based on a corresponding directory path in the software design specification.
Based on the foregoing, an approach for developing software code that does not suffer from the limitations of prior approaches is highly desirable.